Regency wits

Wit was nowhere more in demand than at fashionable dinner parties. In England, "the agreeable man gets more reputation, more eating, and more drinking, in return for his talk than anywhere else," observed Lord John Russell in 1820. Much of this humour belongs to the "you had to be there" moment and has long since gone stale, especially when read on the printed page, but at its finest it still reveals the kind of intellectual agility and esprit so highly prized by Regency men-about-town. Byron thought Scrope Berdmore Davies "one of the cleverest men I ever knew in Conversation." Beau Brummell once bought a grammar book to help him learn French, and when Davies was asked what progress his friend had made in his studies, he replied that Brummell "had been stopped like Bonaparte in Russia by the Elements." Walter Scott praised Henry Luttrell as "the great London wit." When Thomas Moore commented on the dark complexion of a former hatmaker named Sharpe, as though "the dye of his old trade... had got engrained into his face," Luttrell responded, "Yes... Darkness that may be felt." The poet Samuel Rogers was among many who especially relished the wit of the bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith. "Whenever the conversation is getting dull, he throws in some touch which makes it rebound, and rise again as light as ever," Rogers recollected. Of Luttrell, Smith declared: "[His] idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie to the sound of trumpets." Of his friend Mrs. Grote when she entered the drawing room wearing an enormous, rose-colored turban: "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque." To that same Mrs. Grote: "Go where you will, do what you please, I have the most perfect confidence in your indiscretion." Smith could be scholarly: when he heard two women shouting at each other across an alleyway, he observed that they would never agree, for they were "arguing from different premises." He could also be crude: if the name of his friend Miss Alcock was translated into Latin, it would be "Domina omnis penis."

- Robert Morrison, The Regency Years, New York, 2019, p.99